Why is fast so important to me?

I don't mind sharing my age—I've earned my grey hairs. I was using the internet before it was the internet. I used to hook up my 14.4 kbaud modem to the phone line, dial in to the local freenet, hear that iconic connecting handshake tone, then start browsing text-based menus.

I was 12. For a kid that age to be doing what only two or three other kids at my school were doing felt edgy, new, and full of possibility.

Four years later the World Wide Web dropped HTML visual interfaces on us all. Image file transfers weren’t new to me—but in a text-based world, waiting a few minutes for an image that may or may not be Shirley Manson of Garbage from an album cover was intentional. That was the image I wanted to load. The speed was the price. HTML changed that.

Nobody liked waiting

Suddenly there were images you could click, text you could browse, and layouts that never fully fleshed out until the image finished loading. Uncompressed images meant sites took forever. Even then, nobody liked waiting.

I remember sitting in the computer lab at my high school listening to other kids complaining about how slow a site was loading. They blamed the school’s connection, they blamed the modem speed, they blamed the browser, they blamed the outdated computer chips—but the fact of the matter was, it was poor web optimization.

Beautiful or functional

The myth that sites could either be beautiful or functional was born in the days of dial-up. It wasn’t true then. It’s not true now. Those tradeoffs show up when you force a vision into a box. Lean images, fewer round trips, and a build that doesn’t fight itself—that’s how you get snappy and good-looking. That’s what I strive for.

The two-bar bar

I see the poor 2-bar LTE connection on the highway while you’re exploring rural Canada as the bar. This is my line in the sand. I originally built my backend with the vision that touring bands could update their websites from the tour bus. That idea carries me through my sitebuilding today. This year (2026), I got the opportunity to really test it.

Darrell Coleman owns a contracting company right in the middle of cottage country in Ontario. Even at his residence, he doesn’t get a very good connection. My calls with him are often robotically garbled. My testing ground. Three months after I launched his site, I spoke to him about how it’s performing. It passes the sporadic LTE test. In Darrell’s words: “The nearest cell tower gives me 3 bars of LTE service. I can still post to my site from my phone.”

Speed matters because we live in the instant gratification world. I’ve seen WordPress sites take up to a minute to load. A site that slow loses potential customers. Full-stop.